A Humble Case For (Re)Uniting Creatives
The more creative energy the better.
When we silo designers, we learn less. Inconsistencies can arise, leading to a disjointed customer experience and diluted brand messaging. We end up in design debt.
Designers and design thinkers are inspired by creativity. The more creative energy the better, especially, it happens, across diverse disciplines. At Pentagram, I worked alongside world class designers who specialized in different tools, but shared a talent for problem-solving using the same kind of creative thinking. These disciplines included brand design, industrial design, product design, software design, architecture, and even sound design. Far and away the most successful projects tended to be those that cut across Pentagram partners, articulating a brand journey with various media. One particularly exciting project comes to mind with the team that launched the Harley-Davidson Museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Our team was responsible for the brand of the museum, including the website, swag, and wayfinding. Another Pentagram team was charged with developing and curating the first permanent exhibition, and yet another team designed and built the museum itself. Each team gleaned knowledge and inspiration from the other as we continued fulfilling our own teams’ directives. The result was a wholly unified experience from first arriving at the website to eating a burger at the museum restaurant (with a branded leather jacket from the gift shop, naturally… that we also designed).
Today it seems like a luxury to have so many components of one project under one roof. But we forget that we used to do it all. We all had to be generalists with occasional spikes of specialty. Now we are in the age of specialization, hyper-personalized pathways, where designers are relegated into their precise disciplines, without enough exposure to that diverse thinking — creative thinking — that sparks innovative ideas. This is what we fight against in our Honor mission: to nurture discourse and the exchange of diverse ideas. When we silo designers, we learn less. Inconsistencies can arise, leading to a disjointed customer experience and diluted brand messaging. We end up in design debt.
Designers know this. At Pinterest, Design and Brand lobbied to sit in the same wing, but lost the battle and ended up in different buildings so that Design would be closer to Engineering. Both are important, but while the connection between Design, Engineering, and Product is well documented, the relationship to Brand Design is rarely considered by those outside of the design discipline. And yet, over the last three years at Honor, of the nearly 50 candidates I have interviewed for Product Design positions, nearly every one remarked that a big part of their interest in joining Honor was the close working relationship between Brand and Design. Designers want to work with — and be led by — designers. Together we can move faster, develop shorthand easier, and advocate cross-functionally for each others’ work more effectively.
The benefits aren’t just for our designers. By unifying these functions, we improve the customer journey by building closer alignment between our brand identity and product experience, allowing them both to feed off each other, reinforcing our value proposition, and enhancing brand loyalty. This holistic approach allows us to tell a cohesive story that resonates with customers from their very first interaction with our marketing outreach to their ongoing engagement with our products and services.
Digital products have been led by technology alone for too long. Imagine opportunities to level up our experience design and arrive at solutions that take us further faster. Imagine opportunities to amplify subtleties in our products through a stronger brand connection; nuances like visual design finesse, content strategy, product language, and micro-animations.
We see the best product designers develop such a deep empathy for customer needs, fears, and desires, that it becomes a natural extension from product requirements to emotional brand attributes. Similarly, when we know the pain points of our customers and how we should be talking to them on the front lines, we tend to imagine ways that our product can be even more aligned to their needs. Combining Brand and Design into one team means that these two ends become one symbiotic relationship.
Until very recently, creatives worked together, uniting multidisciplinary design thinkers and doers for the sake of better, richer, more effective solutions. (Re)uniting creatives into one team gives us an opportunity to once again apply design thinking principles holistically to enhance consistency, innovation, and satisfaction end-to-end.